


The Shape of Will Graham

by FannibalToast



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Doubt, Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-16
Updated: 2018-12-16
Packaged: 2019-09-20 06:06:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17017164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FannibalToast/pseuds/FannibalToast
Summary: Beverly reflects on the nature of Will Graham when she visits him in prison to discuss the mural killings. Will is different now. Beverly needs to see if there is anything left of the man she knew.





	The Shape of Will Graham

**Author's Note:**

> No matter how many times I watch it, the scene where Beverly first visits Will in prison hurts my heart. She comes to ask about a case, not just to see her friend, and the look on Will's face when he realizes that destroys me. This fic is an attempt to dig deeper into that scene and make peace with it.

Beverly Katz knew evil. The evidence she picked off bodies, the elaborately horrific states they were in when they got to the lab—this had inoculated her against knee-jerk reactions. She was collected, clinical. She was a woman of science and facts and measured conclusions. Dread wasn’t something she’d felt since her early years in the BAU, and it had long been replaced by steely determination to take the nearly mythical horrors that crossed her path and turn them into logical segments of data that would help her catch the monsters behind the murders.

But she felt dread when she laid eyes on Will Graham.

It took its time. It reached out to her from the reclining shadows, pricking against her skin and seeping into her bones. Tension squeezed her pulse into her ears and her palms went clammy. It wasn’t just that she was afraid of Will, of the lies he’d told, of the things he had done. She was afraid of this new shape in front of her. She didn’t recognize the man she had combed evidence from in her lab. She was afraid to admit that man was the same Will Graham she’d met in Nichols home. She didn’t want to look at him, couldn’t yet admit that her fear held the acidic bite of betrayal.

 _Being afraid of Will feels just like abandoning him_ , she thought. 

Will looked bigger caged. His shoulders seemed to curl inward toward his center, his head pressed low, as if the space wasn’t equipped to contain him. It felt abbreviated, as if he’d been jerked out of his known reality and stuffed inside a set of parameters defined by a madman.

 _You unstable, Will?_

She approached the glass wall of the visitation room, careful not to pause or hesitate as she neared the door. Her dread was her own. She didn’t want Will to sense it. He could see her anger and her confusion, these she would allow, but she wouldn’t let him see that she was afraid. 

Hadn’t he endured enough of that?

She caught the look on his face before he spotted her, saw the ferocious glint in his eyes. She had seen Will scared before, had sat beside him when he was lost and shaken. This was something else. This was biblical. This was a brushfire of rage that ignited around him in a halo of righteous fury. 

This wasn’t evil, but innocence had fled. 

Beverly’s pulse pounded in her ears. _It’s for the case. I have see him for the case._ The psycho stringing bodies together had to be stopped, and even now, Will could help stop him. But she needed to know Will again. 

She’d intruded on him the day they met. He’d been recreating the murder of Elise Nichols, lowering himself into the mire left by Garret Jacob Hobbs. 

“You’re Will Graham,” she’d said, yanking him up from the depths. 

“You’re not supposed to be in here.” His voice had wavered, his breath harsh and ragged. She wondered now if she would have been able to pull him up this time, if she should have been watching him more closely. 

_Could I have saved him?_

Beverly had pulled enough evidence off Will to ensure that the world knew he killed Abigail Hobbs. But when she’d startled him in Elise Nichols’ bedroom, she saw his face contort in confusion and pain, heard him gasp and sputter as if recreating this crime had crushed the air out of him. It wasn’t just fear she’d seen on him; it was shame. Shame that he could send his mind to such dark corners, and shame that he’d been caught bending his mind to the shape of that darkness.

As she looked at him now, enclosed in a cell that wasn’t meant for him, she needed to know if he could still feel that shame. She’d pulled him up from the recesses of his own mind once; despite what she’d found, Beverly struggled to rationalize that _that_ Will could have murdered Abigail Hobbs. If she could find that shame in him, could just brush aside the debris of all these facts, perhaps she could prove to herself that there was still a shred of her friend left. 

_It’s not shame I’m looking for_ , she corrected herself suddenly. _It’s humanity. I want to see if that darkness still shakes him._

He turned to look at her, then, and she saw something shift in his eyes. The shift broke her resolve and she paused, just for a moment, as she pushed into the room. He seemed to slip backward into himself, the fire in his gaze dissipating into a twist of smoke and gentle ash. It was as if his own reality had snapped back into place and he was himself again. That fury was gone, but the heat of it still radiated in his eyes. He wasn’t her Will, but looking at him, at the surge of pure joy and relief at seeing her, she knew the imprint of her Will was still there. 

“It’s good to see you,” he said. The earnestness in his voice made her chest ache.

 _A hunch isn’t enough_ , she told herself, slipping back behind her shield of logic. _I have to back it up. I see the humanity in him, but I need to prove it’s really there. I have to prove he didn’t do this._

She saw the pain ripple across his face when she mentioned the case. Multiple people missing, bodies found preserved. She held her gaze on him. It was easier this way, to let the case be her reasoning, her excuse to see him. She was still a woman of science, and Will was evidence.

She knew this: Will was different now. There was humanity in him, but he wasn’t the man she pulled up from the pit of his own mind. 

For the first time since she’d known him, Will wasn’t malleable. She could see that in the rigidity of his shoulders, the set of his jaw, heard it in the evenness of his voice. When he looked at her, there was no tremor, no quick aversion of his eyes. Being here, moored to his unquiet mind, had set him to burn, had made him a kiln where Will would solidify into a shape of his own making. Despite her utter despair at the loss of the Will Graham she knew, she clung to a tattered rag of hope that she might still recognize the shape of him when he emerged from the flame. 

If she knew him, she could save him.


End file.
